A method of measuring the flexibility of production systems

It is important for managers to make their production system more flexible to adapt changes in uncertain environment. But how to measure and control the flexibility is a difficult problem. This paper is focused on measuring the flexibility of production system. In the first part, we proposed a new vector description of the flexibility with three dimensions: rang, time and cost. We, analyzed the factors that affect flexibility of production systems, and proposed an optimization model of the flexibility of production system. In the latter part, a method of measuring flexibility was established. The flexibility of a production system was measured to demonstrate this method.